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Eve Outdoor Cam is simply a sleek outdoor video camera for HomeKit, with integrated LED floodlight ideally designed to light up your driveway at night. I’ve been a fan of the Eve Indoor camera for a while, and my experience with the Outdoor Cam is likewise positive. HomeKit cameras are better than ever, thanks to crucial user interface upgrades to the Apple Home app in iOS 16.
And HomeKit safe Video support means clips are saved to your iCloud account in an end-to-end encrypted manner. To make things even more compelling, this set up requires no additional monthly subscription to use, assuming you pay for any iCloud storage. So how does Eve Outdoor Cam and the state of HomeKit safe Video fare? Very well, for the most part …
Hardware plan of Eve Outdoor Cam
The Eve Outdoor Cam feels solid and well built. I had individual aid me install it, and even they remarked on the premium manufacturing of all the parts as they were putting it together. Build quality of the unit is high.
The simple black and white plastic appearance will fit in well with the decor of most home exteriors. It is not discreet but it is not meant to be, as it of course serves double work as an outside light. Most of the front fascia is taken up by the white light window, although the actual physical LEDs halt just above the black camera bezel cutout.
Situated above the camera is simply a tiny position light. By default, it illuminates blue erstwhile the camera is on, and red erstwhile it is recording. I found the feeble blue/red glow detracted from the otherwise minimal plan of the housing; thankfully, the position light can be turned off in the accessory settings.
Hardwired installation and simple software setup
Eve Outdoor Camera uses Wi-Fi for connectivity and is hardwired for power. This is good due to the fact that it means the camera can have a permanent network connection, with no request for battery saver sleep states … and you don’t gotta worry about swapping batteries all fewer months.
Installation difficulty will vary based on your individual circumstances. I fortunately had an outside “dumb” motion-activated light close the front door already; it was a substance of removing that and rewiring the camera in its place. If you aren’t comfortable with wiring it yourself, it will be a fast occupation for an electrician, assuming you have an existing light fitting available to use. If you don’t have the wiring already in the wall, the endeavor will be much more complicated and possibly not worth the effort.
Once physically installed, set up could not be easier. Open the Home app, scan the HomeKit QR code on the sticker and the telephone will find the camera, bring it on the network, add it to your home, and you’re fundamentally done. Remember, a HomeKit hub (Apple tv or HomePod) is simply a prerequisite to be able to access the camera erstwhile distant from your home network, and to usage the HomeKit safe Video recording features.
Eve Outdoor Cam placed next to my front doorThe camera’s mount allows for a wide degree of adjustment, with leeway for swivel and tilt. Aesthetically, it looks best if positioned consecutive on but I think most people will find they request to adjust it a bit. The scope of angle adjustment combined with the camera lens’s own wide field of view means you should have assurance you will be able to find a good vantage point. Essentially, you just request a placement that puts the camera at or above door height.
If you want to trial this before you take the plunge and buy, hold up an iPhone where you intend to place the camera and snap a picture. The iPhone’s 0.5x lens produces a akin image to what you can anticipate from the Eve Outdoor Cam, in terms of field of view. (At the same time, check you have a unchangeable 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi signal at the location.)
Floodlight is simply a convenient 2-in-1 bonus
The 2-for-1 nature of the unit is simply a large origin in its appeal. If you are going through the effort to hardwire a camera, it might as well do something else at the same time. As I said before, I replaced a nighttime outdoor light with the Eve Outdoor Cam.
I haven’t lost any light functionality. In fact, the camera is simply a better light than what I had before. The LED floodlight is much brighter, fills a wider area, and more customizable thanks to it being network connected.
Through the Eve app, choose whether the motion-activated light is active during the day, at night, or never.
Floodlight is more than adequate to light up my front porch and drivewayYou can besides tweak the light’s on duration and degree of motion sensitivity. I changed the sensitivity from average to advanced to avoid it triggering erstwhile cars on the road drove passed the house. These kind of controls are not typically found in “dumb” conventional outdoor lighting fixtures. 1 slight quirk is that Eve exposes a 0-100 brightness slider and ‘boost mode’ for the light. I didn’t find much visible difference erstwhile the light was set at the minimum or maximum level — it was on or it was off.
Because the Eve Camera light is exposed as its own accessory to HomeKit, you can besides turn it on and off manually in the Home app, or with Siri voice commands, and usage it as part of scenes and automations like any HomeKit smart light.
Eve Outdoor Camera quality
The camera resolution is rated at 1080p, like all HomeKit safe Video cameras. The actual item of the image doesn’t look that sharp — the stream is clearly compressed and rapidly gets blurry erstwhile you zoom in — but it is more than fit for purpose. The wide angle lens means the image covers a large area, easy adequate to watch over my front porch and driveway. The automatic camera vulnerability adjusts well to all lighting conditions, dawn through dusk. The frame rate is simply a small lacking, and I found recordings would occasionally miss out a couple of seconds. Nevertheless, it results in perfectly usable footage.
Day and night imagination (no floodlight active) — snapshots downsampled somewhat compared to first qualityThe night imagination works superbly, enabling the camera to stay useful even in complete darkness. The scope of the night imagination is long; people or animals can be seen anywhere in the frame. You won’t want to hold protracted conversations over the integrated talker and mic, but the audio quality is decent adequate for short two-way talk session with individual waiting on the doorstep.
The mic is delicate and will choice up footsteps or engine sound long before they come into the camera’s view; this can be a blessing or a curse depending on the circumstances.
Cameras in the Home app
The display of cameras in the Home app is greatly improved in iOS 16. You can see your favourite cameras at a glance in the main root view, neatly laid out in a single large panel. The thumbnails show static image snapshots from each camera, refreshing about all 15 seconds. View all cameras with larger thumbnails or tap on an individual camera thumbnail to maximize. The full-screen layout activates the current live camera feed, and includes a timeline so you can scroll back through past recordings.
Recordings with HomeKit safe Video
HomeKit safe Video means the Eve Outdoor Camera output is continuously streamed to a HomeKit hub in the home — like an Apple tv or HomePod — for processing. Recordings can be enabled or disabled separately depending on your geolocation. If you don’t want a camera recording — or even activated at all — while you are at home, you have that option.
The HomeKit strategy is in charge of saving clips erstwhile motion occurs, and sending notifications. If you are super serious about security, you may want to keep a 24/7 rolling camera stream. HomeKit safe Video does not support that, so you’ll gotta look elsewhere.
For most home uses, though, only recording clips of activity is truly what you want — hours and hours of footage of nothing happening is useless. HomeKit camera recordings are stored in iCloud for up to 10 days. The Home app lets you export clips to a file if you request to keep them longer term, or send them to others. You request a paid iCloud account for the cloud recordings feature to be available, but they don’t number towards your retention quota.
Camera notifications are rich and useful
The Home app can notify erstwhile any motion occurs or erstwhile circumstantial subjects of motion are recognized; the strategy can separably detect people, animals, vehicles and packages. If you want to be alerted erstwhile a individual is at the door, but don’t care about the neighbourhood cat walking across the frame, you can do that. Futhermore, face designation means HomeKit will effort and admit precisely who is in the video (based off the People categories in your Photos library); mute notifications entirely from selected persons. I usage the face designation feature to ignore notifications of myself arriving home.
All of these smarts make for any truly rich notifications. Here’s any examples:
- The ‘Entrance Cam’ camera has detected a person.
- The ‘Entrance Cam’ camera has detected an animal. The Entrance Cam camera has detected a individual and a package.
- The ‘Entrance Cam’ camera has detected a individual who may be [name].
The notification content includes a short video clip of the activity, a button to view the current live feed inline, and shortcuts to accessories in the same region as the camera (like the camera’s own flood light).
The cross-platform nature of the Home app means these alerts arrive on all your devices. What’s truly cool is on Apple TV, notifications come in as a PIP window in the corner of the frame, on top of whatever you’re watching. These are the kind of integrations where Apple shines, and where non-HomeKit solutions will fall short. It shouldn’t be understated how useful it is that the Home app is available on all Apple device — I can check in on my cameras on the Mac, or even my watch, whenever I please. How many 3rd organization safety systems even have an app for anything but the iPhone?
Notification controls are not fine-grained enough
However, for all of the notification customization options I just described, the Home app needs even more. This is something outside of Eve’s purview, as all of the HomeKit handling is managed by Apple software. We gotta hope future OS updates include improvements in this department.
A large frustration for me is that the people detection strategy cannot discern between a individual facing towards the camera, or facing away. With my Eve Outdoor Cam in situ looking out onto the driveway, it sees people approach but it besides sees people leaving. Therefore, I get a notification going off almost any time that I, or anyone else, leave the house. HomeKit detects a individual in frame so the notification triggers, but face designation cannot kick in as my head is facing the other way. This may sound like a tiny thing, but a pointless notification all time individual leaves the home rapidly becomes a origin of regular annoyance.
Another complaint I have is that you cannot tell the strategy to silence repeated alerts of the same person. Let’s say it is trash night, and you are walking in and out the home respective times. HomeKit will trigger an alert each time it sees you. I’d love a setting that allows for a short grace period erstwhile the same individual is seen again.
You can’t manage the enabled state of activity detection with automations at all. For instance, I can imagine 1 theoretical mitigation of the ‘person leaving’ problem. Set up a motion sensor in the hall; if motion detected, disable camera notifications for the next minute. This would destruct all the false positives caused by people leaving the house. Unfortunately, this isn’t possible. A control for camera control is not exposed to as an automation mark (so the light of the Eve Outdoor Camera can be automated, but not the camera part).
Eve Outdoor Cam only works with HomeKit
A persistent question with HomeKit and smart home stuff in general is reliability. If you hunt out online, you can find plenty of people with HomeKit issues. I know geofencing rules are peculiarly nebulous, and iOS 16 time-based automations just refuse to activate for any folks. At least in my experience, as 1 person, it all works well adequate for me to be happy.
I have 1 occasional glitch in which the Home app will not let me view the Eve camera’s live stream due to the fact that it says individual else is presently doing that (you can only view from 1 device at a time), but I know no device is active. I have seemingly narrowed this down to a bug with the Home app on Mac, as I have found that beginning Activity Monitor and quitting the homed processes releases the hanging resources and returns the camera to average function.
Eve’s dependence on HomeKit means no additional accounts to manage, no extra cloud service to pay for, and seemingly better performance than any competitors that treat HomeKit as an afterthought. But be aware that if you always fall out of favour with HomeKit, the camera doesn’t work with anything else. If you have Android-using members of your household, tough luck.
Wrap-up
With the Apple ecosystem exclusivity in mind, I can wholeheartedly urge the Eve Outdoor Cam. Smart home cameras are somewhat of a luxury item, and the Eve camera is surely not inexpensive … but they certain are good erstwhile you have them. The ability to check in on my driveway from anywhere — and get alerted if individual is approaching the home — provides peace of head that is hard to quantify. Being able to talk to individual at the door in a pinch is simply a bonus, like a pseudo smart doorbell. Combining a hassle-free camera with a motion-activated floodlight makes for a very compelling all-in offering.
You can buy Eve Outdoor Cam here for $249. I tested the black version for this review. A white edition model is also available.
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